>> Learn how you can use Azure Cognitive Search to get AI
enabled insights from your data in Azure SQL.
This week on Data Exposed SQL Insider Series.
[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and welcome to
this episode of Data Exposed SQL Insider Series.
Today I have Chris joining us.
Chris, thanks so much for joining us today.
Can you kick us off by telling us a little bit about what you do?
>> Sure, my name is Chris Baudo. I'm glad to be here.
I am a Cloud Solution Architect with Microsoft,
I'm focused on Data and AI our workloads on are essentially
help customers on board to your Azure.
>> Awesome, cool. He seemed like the exact right person.
We're going to be talking about
integrating different services together,
specifically Azure Cognitive Search.
Now, that might be something a lot of people aren't familiar with.
Can you start us off by telling us what is Azure Cognitive Search?
>> Sure, Azure Cognitive Search is
a fully featured past service in
Azure that allows intelligence searches
across a multitude of data sources,
some of which include Azure SQL.
Awesome, cool. Now the next question that would probably
come from most SQL people is,
how is this different from SQL Server full-text search?
>> I think the main thing you get with
cognitive search is you have this optional AI enrichment of
your data that uses cognitive services to pull
out some of the key information from your data.
You also have a more robust search experience that's
comparable to enterprise level web searches.
>> Sweet, awesome. Better search,
maybe a little bit easier to use.
Maybe you can get some AI infused into that search capabilities.
That's awesome. I guess the last question is really,
how do you get started is easy?
>> It is all you really need is
an Azure tenant and Azure subscription and
a cognitive services resource connectivity
to an Azure SQL data store you probably already have.
Then just a knowledge about your data,
your tables in your columns,
and that you want to make available for search.
The first step will be going into the Azure portal.
You will see that you have
multiple services available to you the easiest way to
get to cognitive search is just type search up in the search bar.
Then you'll see the service called Cognitive Search.
You click on it. I already have one created.
What I want to do is just create
another one just to show you how easy it is.
You click on Create,
and so you have your Subscription.
What you'll do is you'll choose a resource group.
I haven't development one here.
You'll give your cognitive Search Service or name.
This is probably one of the more important things
is you want to choose
a region that is the same as your Datastores.
If your SQL db or SQL
MI or your SQL Server RBM is in a certain region.
You want to co-locate the search service within that same region.
Mines in South Central us.
I'll choose that here.
Next you can change the pricing tier.
I mentioned the free and basic tiers.
Just to get started.
I'm going to stay with the standard tier for now.
That's the default. Then next I'll click scale.
The first thing you'll notice is obviously the cost.
I have something called insertion yet you
have these things called replicas and partitions.
With one replica, you don't really have any redundancy, any HADR.
What I'll do, if you can choose to,
that'll give you 99.9 percent availability for read operation.
Of one replicated goes down the other ones available.
You can also choose three replicas and get both reads and writes.
Redundancy for operations.
You can also choose extra partitions
and have this cognitive search index as it's called,
spread across multiple partitions for faster querying.
But for now I'll just keep it one in one.
Then click "Next".
Networking. There's a public endpoint by default,
of course it's secured.
You can also have private connectivity with private endpoints,
but for now I'll leave it as public.
No tags. I'll click "Review and Create".
Then finally, click on
my Create button to give the deployment of that service going.
Let me go back.
That's already completed.
I'll go back to cognitive search here.
I'll click on the one I've already created.
The first thing you'll notice is when you pull
up your search service,
if you scroll down just a little bit on the overview screen,
you can see this Get Started tab.
The first thing I would do if I were a DBA or a developer,
and I just wanted the least amount of complexity as possible.
How would you use this Import data wizard?
What that's going to do is hook up your data and ingest
it into the search service and make it available for searching.
If you click on Import Data.
You'll see I have some existing data sources.
I mentioned the multitude of data sources that you can have here.
This first one here is a SQL. Am I have?
You have to specify the table when you
connect to your data source for
the first time that you want to use.
You can also get the drop-down list here and
see all the different options for new connections.
But what I'm going to do is select
this real estate US sample, Azure, SQL db.
I have this table called listings 5K King County, Washington.
I'm going to use this table and make it available for search.
I click "Next" and here's probably the coolest parts.
The whole experience.
When you go into cognitive search,
you have to have for this optional AI capability,
you have to have a cognitive services resource.
You can create a new one here if you don't have
one already have one.
I'm going to click on
my cognitive services resource about pre-created.
Then you add these things called enrichments.
These enrichments get put into what's called a Skillset.
The first thing I have to do is tell it
which field within my table.
I want to do some enrichments on.
I want to choose the description field here,
which is a description of my real estate property in question.
Down here, I'm going to select this checkbox,
which is going to take that description.
It's going to attempt to extract people names,
organization name, location names, key phrases, etc.
I'll uncheck translate texts since I
know my descriptions are in English,
which you can translate that if you want to.
It will also attempt to your extract PII or
personal identifiable information from the description field.
I'll do is click "Next".
Right here, is where I can specify what is searchable.
You'll see these attributes called retrievable,
filterable, sortable, facetable, and searchable.
Those all have different meanings.
But essentially, it's going to take all your columns here.
It's going to define what you can do to
those columns and whether they are exposed and search.
I'm just going to leave the defaults here.
I'm going to click "Next".
I'm going to give my indexer,
and I am an indexer is the thing that's going to
pull the data out of the Datastore,
Azure SQL in this case.
And it's going to convert that data to JSON formats,
going to serialize into JSON.
That JSON is what we're going to search.
I'll click "submit" here.
While that's going, it's going to start that indexing process in
the background is going to take several minutes to complete that.
While the indexer is indexing the data,
I'm going to flip over to an indexed and already have
created scum real estate US sample index with skill set.
Just show you the output.
I'll click Search here.
You can see all the data in the table
has been converted to JSON format.
What I did was I took this description for the AI enrichment.
If you scroll down a little bit and you can see that
it is extracted several locations from the description.
It is also extracted some key phrases.
That's some of the value that's
brought by the optional AI enrichment.
The last thing I'll show is the ability
to query data that's in there.
I want take this query that I have to scroll back up to the top,
and I want to paste my query in here.
You can see it's very easy to search
the data that you have pulled out and put in that index.
That's essentially it. That's all there is to get
started with Azure Cognitive Search.
>> Awesome, cool, thanks so much,
Chris is really interesting to me because it is
super easy to get started connect
your data and start creating these indexes and
then adding that AI to it and then being able to query it.
Thanks so much for coming on the show and showing us this.
To our viewers, if you like this episode,
go ahead and give it a like check out
the description for links to learn more.
We hope to see you next time on Data Exposed. [MUSIC]